Top 100 High ORAC Value Antioxidant Foods

The ORAC values of the following spices-herbs-foods are rated very high (apparently healthier) and are worth considering in your diet and preps for your overall health and well-being.

ORAC is an abbreviation for Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity and was developed by the National Institutes of Health in Baltimore.

In short, ORAC units measure the antioxidant capacity of foods. The higher, the better.

It is widely believed that high antioxidant foods help greatly to lower the risks of cancer, degeneration, and disease.

Here’s the list:

The ORAC values in this list are normalized to 100 grams of weight (about 3.5 ounces) because that is the way in which the original database of information was presented. The intent is to ‘normalize’ the various items to simply compare ‘raw value’.

The list does not factor or attempt to suggest the quantities that a person would normally eat in one serving (for example – who is going to eat 3.5 ounces of cloves in one serving??). I simply wanted to point out which ‘foods’ were literally the highest (that I could find information about).

The list I’ve put together here is not all-inclusive (no list ever is )

64 Comments

@M.S.B., You are outstanding in your range of thoughtful coverage. Thank you for doing the work above. Only things I could add are look at labels. Bulk purchase prices are often better. Look for the location of origin, and whenever possible buy in glass if bulk isn’t stocking what you hope for. Lastly, buy organic whenever you can. Yes, I know there are still rubber stamp profiteers in the food systems, but that incentive is going down as prices are becoming competitive. The above ORAC info. added to the safe plastics factoids, are lessons for the modern survivalists edification.

The ORAC value is expressed in micromoles of Trolox Equivalents per 100 grams (about 3.5 ounces) of sample (this is the laboratory measure of ORAC).

Also, I have found some variations of actual ORAC values per food item when searching various ORAC tables, although most of the lists seem to be reasonably similar. Differences probably have to do with exact format of food, quality, variety, etc.

Knowing the standard amount of measure does put some perspective on each item, although it does not detract from its overall apparent ‘goodness’ for your health.

For example, No-one eats 3.5 ounces of cinnamon at once — in fact it would be VERY unwise to do so because 3.5 ounces of cinnamon would be an incredible and unnatural amount – and it thins your blood. In this example, it would probably be smart to limit to no more than 1 teaspoon daily depending on your medical condition (always consult your doctor), etc.. But this is mostly common sense for most of these items on the list.

Always know what you are consuming and the potential side-effects. Do your due-diligence and discover this information for yourself and how it may affect your unique condition. And as always, “consult your doctor”.

I’m glad this older article was brought up, since somehow I missed it when I went through the archives.

Very enlightening information. I compared the top 100 list to what I grow and eat from my garden. It looks like I have pretty good coverage; about 40 out of 100. But I see room for improvement too.

I’m adding 5 or 6 trees this fall, fig, orange, plum, and some more nut trees. Possibly a lemon tree. Although the citrus fruits aren’t on the top 100 list (I think they fall somewhere around 2,000 units), they grow really well here, as opposed to say blueberries, that don’t like the climate here at all.

I’m trying to include high ORAC value foods that are also packed with other nutrients, such as the Vit. C in oranges.

Red bell peppers are very high in Vit C, but I have better luck with citrus trees than pepper plants. Hot peppers will grow like weeds for me but bells don’t like me, even though I try every year to grow them. Same with beans, they won’t produce for me, so I rely on canned or dry beans.

I really like the things I only need to plant once, perennials and trees.

Almost everyday for the last five months, I drink tea composed of cloves, cinnamon, green tea, and cardammon (personal recipe). Cloves are strong so I try to take 1 gram a day of it. I’m glad I found this page. It strengthens my commitment in drinking this tea everyday.

@Lyndon: Are you aware that cinnamon acts as a blood thinner if you take 1/2 teaspoon or more per day?

I’ve been stocking up on it because I’m on coumadin therapy and would need a replacement for it.

If you don’t NEED the blood thinning, I would be very careful with regular cinnamon intake.

The green tea is excellent! We drink water, green tea and small amounts of coffee at my house. Only. It makes for really easy beverage shopping. My sis-in-law nags us to drink juice, but I know what goes into bottled juice and won’t buy it. We eat fresh raw fruits and vegetables.

Sorry to read that you are on Coumadin (rat poison). I’ve heard horror stories about that medication. I would definitely find something other than that to get by on. Actually, I would try to find something different for today. One bad pill could ruin your day.

I’m fortunate, I guess, to be on a calcium channel blocker and a baby (81mg) aspirin. Bayer used to have the patent on the 81mg size. Those rotten bastards wanted 30 cents per pill. Now available in generic. Maybe 2 cents a pill. Note: dentists go ape chit if you take aspirin daily. Suspect that warfarin would be worse.

If the government cared about people they would:
1) Put all the ‘good’ pharmaceutical companies on a boat.
2) Shoot the rest.
3) Sink the boat.

We in the US pay the R&D costs. I used to have to get my pills from another country. All legal, but totally bullchit.

Check out Tumeric,and natto (or natto kinase) there are other natural blood thinners out there but these come to mind ,and I believe that coumadin is derived from tumeric, or specifically cumin which is one of the active ingredients. Nattokinase actually mimics plasminogin and helps disolve fibrogin blood clots. Make sure you work with your Doctor, and reduce the dosages of your medication “coumadin” if you do start using the above as, there of course is the danger of “too much thinning of the blood” which could lead to aneurisms. Good luck

Yes, that is why, by reading sources in the net, the best cinnamon for me is Ceylon cinnamon from Sri Lanka and not Cassia cinnamon from China. Cassia is abundant with coumarin that is a potent blood thinner, which could be dangerous to one’s health. While Ceylon has low coumarin level and it is best for everyday use, at least for me.

My choice would be the Cassia cinnamon to use instead of the coumadin. I’m stocking this in my preps, but I’m a little afraid to try using it now. The reason is that I spoke with my doctor about it and she has refused to order the blood tests I need every month if I stop taking the coumadin and change to the cinnamon. So I would have no way of knowing if it is effective or, worse, TOO effective.

I would change doctors and try to find one more open to alternative treatments but I have health coverage by Medi-Cal, and I can only go to ONE clinic that is 40 miles away, unless I want to pay for it myself.

I have done a lot of research on Purple Corn. When someone is saying 10,800 for Purple corn they are only talking about the whole kernels of Purple Corn and not the extract. The extract is actually 10 to 20 times that amount. The ORAC value of Purple Corn is way higher than even ACAI. All purple colors have high Orac values.

While this is a helpful table, it is not a practical one. The ORAC values should be also be listed by physical sizes, such as a quarter of tsp of cinnamon powder, 1 whole pear, etc. to make for practical applications and to compare apples to apples so to speak, no pun intended.

@jane, you are correct that a new list which takes into account an expected ‘normal’ intake (or serving) for each ingredient (which is different from one to the other) would be helpful for ‘practical’ use – the amounts which would represent a reasonable daily intake.

Maybe some day

The current list is ‘normalized’ such as to compare each food’s ORAC goodness based on the same quantity (100 grams).

That is strictly for 100g of whole kernels (raw) of Purple Corn. If you are talking about the extract (which is what most of the ones that are listed on this website) are the extracts. If you take the same amount of EXTRACT with this other it would be over 2 million on the Orac value. Way more than Acai. There are studies that are coming out about Purple Corn and its benefits.

I was recently researching the ORAC scale/list as I was also researching the health benefits of Cacao nibs. However, it is disappointing to learn that both the USDA and the EFSA consider these values to be biologically irrelevant, and as has been pointed out by numerous comments left here that there seems to be no standardization or comparison when measuring the ORAC value.

What’s more is that none of the ORAC level data has ever been peer-reviewed (please correct me if I am wrong, I have tried to find it), so actually could quite easily be completely inaccurate or in extreme cases made up.

what I recall reading a few times, and being puzzled by it was apparently the persons (historically) who live in areas where sugar cane is grown routinely chew on pieces of sugar cane. ( I think slice a entire piece off and chew).. The puzzling part, I recall the writer questioning, was that these people did not seem to develop cavities or other dental problems, as might have been expected from high sugar product.

also, this was fresh sugar cane, I recall being chewed.

I also recall reading, at least a couple of times, of persons who had moved from areas where sugar cane was grown, to say, North America, and only being able to access the Cane in the local market. Both times I read about this, the persons said what they could buy in the market was no where close to what they were used to, and quite awful.

I just learned something about cinnamon, as my wife and I started to take this with honey as it is supposed to help with arthritis. Cassia cinnamon is what most of us have always been buying in grocery stores. Well, cinnamon is all the same. The nutritional value of cinnamon is from the Ceylon cinnamon.http://www.whfoods.com/
Keep up the good work Ken.

Years ago, the Merck Pharmaceutical Manual contained the information of how to extract medicinal compounds from plants to provide doctors a way to give a standardized dosage of medication. One reason this was done was because the same plants may contain different amounts of the needed compound. Too little of a medication may not work. Too much may be harmful. Yet here in this discussion people are taking random amounts of various things. Do you know why you are taking a herbal remedy? Is your source something you read somewhere that it’s good for you? Do you know that some plant compounds may have severe consequences? I have much more trust in someone with many years of scientific education who uses a thoroughly tested product, rather than pseudoscience based hearsay.

Yes and no. If pharmaceutical science was such an exact science, then why are their so many drug recalls and so many commercials about lawsuits against the drug manufacturers. They find out later that it has negative or fatal side effects.

100 years ago about half the children born in the world died before the age of 5 and about half of those who survived those first five years died before age 18. It was common to that adults would die from disease, injury and childbirth long before reaching the old age of 60. Today most children live to their 70’s and few die from disease until they reach old age. All of that is thanks to pharmaceutical science. Since then with the more or less easy, cheap and simple medicines and vaccines already developed the scientists and doctors have taken on the more knotty problems and medical challenges with some success and some failures. The process to approve a drug is long and expensive and hindered by the difficulty in testing them on the intended recipient. Many of the drugs have side effects and some of those side effects can be serious. The legal profession, mostly a few very large and very dishonest law firms, have taken advantage of all this to become quite rich. Almost all of these legal cases when actually brought to trial will be in a court in rural mississippi or Texas. They depend upon the loose civil laws in these two states and of course on the ignorance and low levels of education especially in rural Mississippi to win the cases. Very few of these cases were legitimate, as in the medicine in question did more harm then good. Most were simple cases of unknown side effects that surfaced after testing or a failure by the drug companies to follow the maze of legalese rules for their warning labels. Ironically the most dangerous drug available to us is common aspirin. But it preceeds all the many laws, regulations and traps that have been put in place by the trial lawyer lobby so no one cares about them. The trick is to first denigrate a new drug in the press with reports true or false. Then to advertise for victims for a really large class action law suit. Then bring the case to court in podunk Mississippi and make sure the jury are all old people who never graduated from high school and convince then that the mean nasty big pharma is out to kill them and the lawyers are here to save them. The lawyers are all multi-millionaires and the pharmeceutical industry is being squeezed but the real victim will be all of us as the new life saving drugs will simply not be developed.

Back in Branson, MO a Dr. Shealy recommended Nature Blessed cherry tart concentrate which had extreme ORAC count. But I’m in Charlotte now and can’t find it. Might be on Amazon…I’ve found very different items searching there. Go to my email and check the targeted items for any kind of “itis” which allopathic medicine should not legally be allowed to go near. I grew up in NYC and on the radio Dr. Atkins affectionately referred to the FDA as the “effin” FDA. Over 30 years I’ve searched for info on many conditions and it took a vetenarian turned ND to open my eyes and brain that all vertebrates are the same except one specie can speak the other cannot. Bottom line: people die not from lack of chemo or drugs but rather from nutrient deficiency as over time for instance anything with gluten prevents absorption of nutrients in the gut. Thus, over time, the “itis’s” come in and anything chronic drugs merely cover the symptoms….but most know that these days. People with MS,MD or any nervous system problem need cholesterol…yes! Cholesterol…why? because without it you can get the 4 types of alzheimer problems as well as lupus, ms, musc dys….cholesterol is essential so get those eggs, butter and never over cook your meat…never: so rare or medium rare….all the blood is drained when they slaughter the animal anyway….i have so much more info so if you do not want side effects, (and check out iutragenic diseases…forgive me, I know i misspelled it) but it means what you get from hospitals, diseases that can be deadly, check out my email address….I’m 63 and have spent 3 decades searching for something definitive developed by someone knowledgeable…the courts 8 times tried to put this man out of business but with thousands of chemistries, pathologies and autopsies he won everytime! EVERYTIME! May He Whose Name is above every name above, upon and under the earth Bless you exceedingly!

The ORAC values in this list are normalized to 100 grams of weight (about 3.5 ounces). Green Tea apparently has an ORAC value in the vicinity of 1,200 μ mol TE/100g, and although a high value – it’s not as high as those in the list above.

The list is somewhat misleading however when you factor in the quantities that a person would normally eat in one serving (for example – who is going to eat 3.5 ounces of cloves in one serving??), but that was not my intention. I simply wanted to point out which ‘foods’ were literally the highest (that I could find information about).

Thank you Ken for the ORAC list. Dr. Wallach’s work and the development of Youngevity. I am a type 1 diabetic and have had four heart attacks in the last 3 years. Also, bypass surgery. My heart’s ejection fraction was 30 a year ago and this month tested to be 38. Y – hands lifted up. The most important products of Youngevity that I take are: Selenium, Healthy Heart pack, and the Triple Treat Chocolate (filled with Dark Probiotic chocolate and blueberry extract. One piece is around the same ORAC value as the Baking Chocolate). Jesus gave Youngevity to me when I was crying out for answers to my health.
Thank you again, Ken, for your research and sharing it with the world.

This list is useless as presented for someone seeking to eat the right foods for their anti-oxidant values. WHO WOULD EAT A CUP OF THE SPICES AS YOU HAVE BASICALLY PRESENTED IN YOUR LIST COMPARED TO A CUP BLUEBERRIES, WILD SALMON, SARDINES, POMNEGRANATES ETC?—-STAN RICHARDS

The ORAC values in this list are normalized to 100 grams of weight (about 3.5 ounces) because that is the way in which the original database of information was presented. The intent was to ‘normalize’ the various items to simply compare ‘raw value’.

The list does not factor or attempt to suggest the quantities that a person would normally eat in one serving (for example – who is going to eat 3.5 ounces of cloves in one serving??). I simply wanted to point out which ‘foods’ were literally the highest (that I could find information about).

Survival blog topics for a life of preparedness and risk awareness; emergency and disaster or threats thereof.

MSB

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